'Predictive policing' tries to stop violent crime before it happens

Tom Cruise in the 2002 film Minority Report. In the
film, psychics help police stop crimes before they
happen.20th Century
Fox

Police departments in major American cities are trying to prevent
violent crime with the help of an unlikely ally: data mining.

In recent years, law enforcement agencies have been experimenting
with "predictive policing," a tool that harnesses computer
algorithms to identify individuals likely to commit crimes,
The New York Times reports.

It may sound a little bit like "Minority
Report," a fictional future where psychics help police
catch criminals right before they commit their crimes, but the
reality is a bit more mundane.

The Times story details one way in which predictive policing is
implemented in Kansas City: "call-ins." Armed with information on
recent parolees, high-crime neighborhoods, and personal networks
both off- and online — plus more anecdotal information like
rumors that police hear on the street — algorithms detect
individuals suspected to be influential in criminal groups.

Those individuals are then called in, as a group, to meet with
police officials as well as "local and federal prosecutors, plus
the police chief and the mayor."

The officials warn that future violent offenses by the
attendees, or even their associates, will be punished
harshly. And they've got examples to back it up — like a man who
was caught with a bullet in his pocket after receiving a call-in
warning. He ended up with a 15-year prison sentence.

Police hope that these warnings will trickle down from the
suspected leaders to the people they influence.

Predictive policework is rooted in complex mathematical
models, but the basic premise is actually quite simple. A
foundational
paper on modeling crime compares crime to earthquakes to
explain the rationale.

Just as earthquakes tend to lead to more earthquakes nearby
and in the near future, gang retaliations, serial offenders,
and repeated burglaries on a single location tend to create
clusters of criminal offences that, with the right algorithms,
police can forecast.

But predictive policing is new — Time magazine called it one of
the best inventions of 2011 — and the preliminary
numbers are hard to believe. According to The Times story,
homicide rates have taken a slight dip in Kansas City since they
began their predictive No Violence Alliance (NoVA) about five
years ago. A significant drop was seen in 2014, but it is
difficult to say that the change came about directly because of
the program.

John S. Hollywood, one of the authors of the RAND report, told
The Times that the few studies on predictive policing have shown
only a 5 or 10 percent increase in crime forecasting compared to
"regular policing methods."

The RAND report claims that predictive policing lets departments
with limited resources use those resources more efficiently, and,
according to The Times, advocates of the programs believe that
"predictive policing can help improve police-community
relations by focusing on the people most likely to become
involved in violent crime."

Critics have claimed that predictive policing can easily lead to
racial profiling. The fear is that over-eager modeling could lead
to even more false-positives than before. Speaking with
Fox News Latino, Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that algorithms given
selective data will create a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

"If the data is biased to begin with and based on human
judgment," Fakhoury said, "then the results the algorithm is
going to spit out will reflect those biases." The same Fox report
notes that, of 685,000 police stops in New York in 2011, 87
percent of the people stopped were Black or Latino. Foster Maer,
a lawyer for a New York Latino advocacy group, told Fox that
"because the data is racially biased, the names that come out
will be racially biased. Predictive Policing will replicate and
expand the program at an individual level."

Despite the uncertain future of predictive policing,
The Times reports that the technique is being
employed in a number of police departments and district
attorneys' offices across the country, including Kansas City, Los
Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Manhattan, and Philadelphia.